Acceptance of the Avatar

An interesting facet of video game genre is that many of the mainstream genres of video games follow a narrative that involves a premade protagonist. While some video games attempt to make the protagonist as much of a blank slate as possible (The Metroid series, The Halo series, the Half-Life series, etc), other video games have controllable protagonists with distinctive identities and personalities, such as Hiedo Kojima’s Metal Gear series, and the Grand Theft Auto series after GTA3. Yet, this still does not stop players from accepting these protagonists as themselves. After all, the “magic” from playing these videogames are not cheapened simply because the player’s agency is channeled through a separate entity. (Nor is it strengthened by a blank slate. While Half Life’s protagonist Gordon Freeman specifically lacks any sort of personality to further enhance the series’ immersion techniques, Resident Evil 4 and 5’s protagonists, Leon S. Kennedy and Chris Redfield, respectively, can be interchanged without much difference in narrative writing style. While mainly cited as a joke, the ubiquitous use of brown short haired men with notable stubble show the industry’s need to make blank slate characters to apply to the broadest range of players.)

However, we still accept these characters actions, no matter how varied the actual character is, as our own actions. If the main draw of video games is their ability to create new experiences (and thusly, a new existence), then why complicate this illusion with a separate character identity? Why spend so much time developing a character if any avatar will satiate the experience?

This is because acceptance of an avatar has nothing to do with the character’s personality (or lack thereof) and everything to do with how we perceive our own existence. Our own existence can only be defined by the things we do, and the direct consequences we can see as a result of our actions. There is nothing to confirm existence other than events that are a direct result of our own actions. It is this facet of experience that allows players to in effect impose the experiences of the avatar as their own experiences.

When a player interacts with a video game, depending on the narrative of the video game (or the circumstances of a multiplayer game), the player controls an avatar through a set of objectives or waypoints. According to the narrative of a video game, it is the character who completes these objectives. However, the fact that it is the player who in effect brings the completion of the objective into fruition allows the player to transfer experience from the avatar onto the player. In effect, the existences of the completions of objectives only exist because of a player’s interaction. This is how players are ready to accept an avatar’s accomplishments as their own.

Then what does this say about video game narratives? Are they completely superfluous? If the experience provided by a video game is completely independent from its narrative, then why do we enjoy the complex storylines that rival multimillion dollar blockbuster Hollywood films? Have we been conditioned to have narrative out of necessity? Or is there something inherently attractive about a narrative? Is there something humanistic about narrative?

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